Connecting Care: Building Collaborative Pathways through Social Prescribing

Background:The Canadian healthcare landscape is undergoing a transformative shift, with increasing recognition that health outcomes are influenced not only by medical interventions but also by social determinants of health. Traditional healthcare models often fall short in addressing these determinants, resulting in an overreliance on acute care, service fragmentation, and under-valuing of community supports and services.Social prescribing offers a paradigm shift by enabling healthcare providers to refer patients to dedicated navigators who can connect them to non-medical resources, such as social activities, exercise programs, support groups, and arts initiatives, to improve overall well-being. This practice, well established in the UK and rapidly gaining traction across Canada, places a strong emphasis on person-centred co-creation, empowering individuals to take the lead on their own health. At the same time, social prescribing takes an asset-based approach to foster intentional collaboration across sectors to provide right care in the right place, reducing acute care usage where appropriate, elevate community leadership in integrated care, and strengthen long term resilience.This workshop will explore how social prescribing pathways can be a practical and impactful tool to strengthen integrated health and social care, and offer activities for attendees to apply the practice to their own settings. Audience: This workshop is targeted towards healthcare providers, social services, and community support providers, patients and caregivers, policymakers, and researchers interested in advancing integrated health, social care, and fostering collaboration across sectors. It provides valuable insights for those seeking to enhance healthcare delivery and elevate community leadership by incorporating social prescribing into their practice or policy initiatives. Approach:Drawing on research literature, best practices globally and across Canada, and recent experiences and lessons learned from Healthy Aging Alberta social prescribing initiatives, this workshop will explore the role of social prescribing in promoting integrated care, community health, and inter-sector collaboration. The following structure is suggested:- Introduction (20mins): Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing (CISP) and Healthy Aging Alberta (HAA) will provide an overview of social prescribing, including what it is, how it works, and evidence of impact on health and wellbeing. We will further explore how to build cross-sectoral collaboration through social prescribing pathways and provide tools for community readiness assessment toward implementing this practice.- Group activity (20 min): The audience will be divided into groups and, through a facilitated process, design a social prescribing intervention/initiative based on various provided contexts.- Share back and discussion (20 mins): Each group will share back on their designed initiative and reflect on opportunities and challenges in their own settings.- Closing and final remarks (5mins): CISP and HAA will share final remarks on next steps and thought starters for consideration. Outcomes: After attending the workshop, the audience will:- Be familiar with the definition, pathway, and impact of social prescribing, and the role of community and other diverse sectors- Understand the role of SP in integrated health and social care, and the opportunity to strengthen community leadership and build collaborative partnerships- Learn how to assess community readiness and begin designing social prescribing pathways for diverse contexts